I'm working on my mandatory continuing legal education, which means it's time for me to remind everyone--particularly everyone at @vastatebar--that this is a scam. It's basically just a transfer program from lawyers to the purveyors of CLE.

There are more than 29,000 attorneys admitted in Virginia. The cheapest CLE bundles I've seen go for around $75. So lawyers are paying at least $2,175,000 to satisfy these requirements. But that's only a fraction of the true cost; you have to also consider opportunity cost.

Each Virginia lawyer has to complete 12 hours of CLE annually. Assuming the average hourly rate for attorneys in Virginia is $150 (a significant underestimate), that works out to $52,200,000 in lost attorney time each year. That value is just destroyed.

This might be worth it if mandatory CLE made people markedly better at their jobs, but I've never met anyone who thinks it does. This is not surprising, because the system is not set up to ensure CLE makes people better at their jobs.

For example, I'm completing my requirement through a subscription service from a leading purveyor of legal materials. Of the 60 courses accredited for Virginia, not one touches on the areas of law I practice. Virginia does not care.

Virginia does care, however, that at least four of my required hours come from live courses, presumably because they suspect (not without cause) that people don't really pay attention to prerecorded content. Query, then, why they continue to require the extra eight hours?

Is all this necessary? Washington, D.C., doesn't think so. They have the most lawyers per capita of any jurisdiction in the United States, and they have no continuing legal education requirements after the first year of membership. I would be astonished if it made any difference.

None of this is a criticism of professional development. But competent lawyers already stay up to date on developments in their field, while incompetent lawyers can't be trusted to take CLE seriously, if they can even find CLE that covers their practice areas.

In short, everyone would be better off if, instead of requiring annual CLE, the @vastatebar just required every practicing attorney to set $100 on fire each year. It would produce substantially equivalent results at a fraction of the cost.